Yahoo Pipes: A Mashup Killer?

"After a year, from the resulting $40 in revenues, take a day off from the blogosphere, grab some food, walk up a lonely hill, and think about the world – hopefully you’ll come up with the idea for your web 3.0 site."

Via De:Bug blog, where the post resulted in a small discussion about the viability of mashup businesses in general in light of Pipes.

This is one aspect of Pipes that has been largely overlooked so far: The platform might just be a mashup killer in the sense that it shows people that there is no long term business model in building a website based on just a simple remix of tho other websites. After all, people can do that on their own now.

One example is a Pipe that I build in a few minutes this morning: Deli.co.comments makes use of Del.icio.us to track the comments you left on other weblogs. It's really not that fancy, and one could probably improve it a lot with some filters, more contextual information and maybe a possibility to add comment threads without RSS via Dapper or something like that.

Or one could use Cocomment.com, which is based on the same idea. Cocomment is developed by a Swiss startup which came up with a much more polished and user-friendly solution.

Of course it would be crazy to compare my quick hack to the Cocomment platform. But essentially Cocomment is just a mashup tool - and is that really worth 1.5 million dollars?